A Jaw-Dropping Food Truth That Changed My Life
In a specialization world where very few workers can produce a lot, we delegate to “others” (coordinated by firms and governments) the mission of producing the stuff we want.
The private sector produces much of what we consume, and that is a good thing, because the State is notoriously inefficient, slow to adapt, and not confronted to incentives for innovation. I am not an anti-State person or economist, because the State DOES have an important role in modern economies and societies, but it is better restricted to some specific missions, which are already big and complex enough.
The private sector seeks profits with increasing production volumes to sell to an increasing demand and cutting production costs as much as possible, especially when there is competitive pressure.
Since private firms have the mission to produce stuff, we have no idea “how” the production is done. We “trust” that they are not enslaving children in the process, we trust that they are not overly polluting the natural world, and we trust they are treating people at least somewhat decently, as well as not selling us poison. There is an implicit contract between consumers and producers about the conditions and consequences of production, as well as the impact of the stuff they sell to us on our well-being and safety.
Everything is cost-benefit analysis
If we wanted a zero-cost production system, without ANY form of pollution, product failures, and other issues, well… we would produce nothing and do nothing!
A company that would sell cars that explode all the time would eventually be put out of business by competitors offering a better and safer product. This competitive pressure, along with laws and regulations, ensures that “quality” grows in the long run, along with production efficiency.
Overall, this is certainly true for material goods. I have reservations about food, and especially food that involves living creatures…
In a way, food IS just another good. Like a house or a chair or a car. Yet, food is very special, for 2 major reasons:
- The food we eat directly impacts our health.
- Some of the food we eat comes from emotion-rich animals.
BOTH of these points are highly sensitive topics. Lets discuss them both…
The food we eat directly impacts our health
In an ideal society, each individual would display personal responsibility about what they eat, what they feed their kids, and what the impacts of that food has on them, both in terms of physical and mental health and vitality. I am a firm believer in personal responsibility.
The information IS “out there” and even if it can get very confusing due to all the opposing ideologies and defensive posturing we are confronted to, the actual facts ARE there and are not particularly confusing. Healthy eating is a generally well-known “recipe” and it’s not rocket science for anyone who puts in the initial effort to get the knowledge. It’s explained with scientific rigour in many books and documentaries such as “Food Choices” or “Forks Over Knives” and so many others.
The problem for us consumers is that we only have so much time and psychological energy to “attribute” to personal education about food, so we tend to make quick associations, and we subconsciously “seek” associations that comfort us in our beliefs and habits… and companies know this and use it a LOT.
Companies influence research programs and results a LOT via direct or indirect financing of “research” in government institutions, think tanks, etc. They also influence social media exchanges and information, especially the powerful lobbies. This is why we all think we need milk and other dairy products to be healthy, which we KNOW as hard fact is false. Yet we cling to this idea. We KNOW (or could know since the info is readily available) all kinds of hard facts and we disregard them, because they are not what we want to hear.
The largest food conglomerates do not want you to change your habits. They want you to keep eating all that prepared and processed food, meat, dairy, pasta, and sugar, because we are hooked on it and they want to keep it that way. Just like cigarette companies that denied any health issues related to smoking back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s… eventually, reality was SO clear that they had to simply back off.
Let’s get real: the huge health problems observed in most rich countries have common causes: stress, processed food, sugar, meat, and dairy. These are the standards of most rich countries, especially in the USA… We are overweight and suffer from all kinds of nutrition-related illnesses, and it’s NOT because we eat “too much fruits and vegies.”
But fair enough: maybe people value all that bad eating (because “it tastes good”) more than feeling healthy and alive and vigorous. That is the case of cigarettes: if you smoke and don’t bother others with your second hand smoke, it’s fine, go right ahead. With food, as far as only the health aspects go, I would tend to feel the same way: it’s your business. On a side note, taste actually changes dramatically, if given a chance. I am one very strong example, and I know TONS others…
But food is a bit different than cigarettes that only causes harm to ourselves, because meat and dairy come from living, breathing, feeling animals…
Some of the food we eat comes from emotion-rich animals
Producers have zero incentives to treat animals well. All they want is to produce at the lowest possible cost and sell at the highest possible price. Those that cut production costs the most put pressure on the others to do the same. This type of setup can bring about a well-known problem in economics called adverse selection in the production of animal foods (and clothes, actually). The ones that are willing to “go further” in the process of cost-cutting are the ones that survive in the market.
The efforts of the meat and dairy industries to twist and spin messages and information is amazing and very efficient. They do everything to cut people off from the reality that is “behind their plate” and they are generally successful.
Here is the typical image on a carton of milk:
Isn’t the cow happy! It’s always related to “the beautiful farm” and everything green and happy and peaceful and “like the good old times.”
Reality is that all animals are put through a life in surreal hell (especially dairy cows!). Even the standard manipulations that all food and clothes animals are subjected to is literally beyond your worst nightmares. After a lifetime of suffering, fear, pain, brutality, isolation, and desperation, during which they can never form bonds, play, move around, and be together and with their young, they all end up in an unreal apocalyptic place conveniently called a slaughterhouse.
In this slaughter horror house, they are kicked and electrocuted and hit with sticks into moving towards the “kill zone” at a rate of 1000 per hour where there are machines and metal and lights, where they don’t want to go and are literally in total panic and desperation. They see and hear their “colleagues” atrociously killed and hung upside down and opened before it’s their turn, they are dipped in boiling water to “sanitize” them for our own food security, sometimes while still alive, and all are totally desperate with sadness, panic, depression, fear, pain, and confusion. Farm animals are NOT “stupid”, sorry.
We all give the “OK” to all this because we “really enjoy the taste” during our fun meals between family and friends. Don’t you think it’s time for a bit of decency and compassion?
Here are very “soft” pictures that are closer to reality, but still quite “not so bad” compared to what is happening in reality, believe it or not:
They never see the light of day. They never get to run around and play with their friends. They never get to move much. They are in constant panic mode, which makes pigs chew at the metal bars in a desperate attempt to deal with the stress and anxiety, “free range chickens” peck at each other in desperation due to the extreme conditions, and cows, well… I don’t know how to describe the hell of cows… especially dairy cows, which end up as meat cows after 6 years in hell… Their lives is a living nightmare.
And nobody gives a shit.
These are sentient animals that have complex inner lives and all the range of emotions you can imagine. Just like dogs.
Our arrogance and lack of basic empathy is troubling. OK, “it tastes good.” Geez man. Is that really enough to justify all this horror? Can we not show basic decency?
Asymmetric information, adverse selection, and denial
As long as producers respect regulations, everything just continues, and regulations don’t mean a thing in terms of ethics. We consumers do not ponder for a second the lives of these ultra-suffering animals, because we like the taste of meat and dairy products and we are comforted with the fact that “the government” has regulations that make sure things are generally OK.
This combo of problems causes adverse selection in meat and dairy production: producers that have less ethical restraint treat animals like inanimate, emotionless objects, and we don’t know what is going on, and they are the ones who take over the market… and we don’t want to know, because we don’t want to be confronted with what we “kind of guess intuitively” in the back of our minds about the brutal reality. As long as we don’t “fully know” we are ok, because we have plausible deniability.
This makes the entire system perpetuate itself and reinforce itself through image manipulation, research fudging, spin doctors, and regulation influence by the meat and dairy lobbies.
“Strangely” it has become impossible to see what is going on. They got laws to forbid visits to farms and slaughterhouses. Luckily, we have technology, social networks, and brave animal rights activists that help expose what is behind the veil of secrecy and deception, but it is a constant battle, because MANY people would freak out if they knew the full truth, and that would put the meat and dairy industry in crisis.
Not everyone has empathy. A small minority of the population may not care about the suffering of animals. That’s why you need laws: even if the social norm about something is very powerful, it may not be enough to truly eradicate an unethical situation. Some people have very little empathy and have a heart of stone. I do not, and I came to a very clear conclusion after a year of pondering this subject, as I explained in another post:
Full facts and info without denial + deductive reasoning + empathy = vegan. This is my conclusion, which I call the “Meat and Dairy Trilemma”:
You must choose 2 of the 3 and “sacrifice” the 3rd one.
In today’s world, denying reality (hence choosing the pair “(Empathy, Eat meat and dairy)” and deny reality) is more and more difficult, because we HAVE the facts and they are widely known and circulated.
At this point, most people enter into desperate attempts at exiting the problem caused by cognitive dissonance by saying that we need to eat meat to be healthy and vigorous, that we “always did this so it’s natural” and the list goes on forever. All these fail miserably when confronted to facts, science, logic, and good faith.
It is NOT “necessary” to eat meat or dairy to be extra healthy. Period. Millions of people prove it by their very healthy and happy no-meat-no-dairy existence AND thousands of research papers support this as well. Even my favourite actor Brad Pitt is vegan!
This leaves us with a hard realization: we consume these “products” just for “pleasure” and yet we know the unreal suffering that lies behind it… So we are creating unnecessary suffering. Maybe this is selfish, cruel, and superficial? No?
If we needed meat and dairy, we would have no choice and the best we could do would be to make their lives as happy and as less-brutal as possible. But it’s not the case. Lions and wolves (and dogs and cats) MUST eat meat to live… They are “obligated meat eaters”… and they are like all carnivores: in VERY small numbers and their prey are free and “happy” (i.e. in their normal animal lives) right up to the end.
EVEN consuming “ethically raised and killed” meat and dairy is not a solution, because 1) with current levels of consumption, we would need several planets to give them the natural setting they need to graze and run and live their normal lives, 2) we would still kill them at age 2 for males and age 6 or 7 for dairy females (after they are too “used up” to produce enough milk) instead of their more normal lifecycle of 20+ years, and 3) we would STILL run into the issues of asymmetric info: do you “really know” how those animals are treated? No. And if it allows producers to charge a higher price when they put “ethical” on the package, then it’s easy to “buy” the regulators / watchmen for a few million to say that everything is fun and happiness if it increases profits by several million more…
Fear not for the economy: meat and dairy could totally disappear, and we will still have jobs and profits and all that in other, less cruel industries that are better for our health and less damaging to the environment. Of course, ALL industries create impacts on the natural world, but the meat and dairy are orders of magnitude beyond anything else within legal production activities.
The economics of food is special, because the “products” are NOT immaterial objects and the animals behind the production are not “getting” anything from the deal other than extreme suffering. Unnecessary suffering.
Hope you enjoyed the insights. Clap to show appreciation!
